Facebook Failed to Protect 30 Million Users From Having Their Data Harvested by Trump Campaign Affiliate

In 2014, traces of an unusual survey, connected to Facebook, began appearing on internet message boards. The boards were frequented by remote freelance workers who bid on “human intelligence tasks” in an online marketplace, called Mechanical Turk, controlled by Amazon. The “turkers,” as they’re known, tend to perform work that is rote and repetitive, like flagging pornographic images or digging through search engine results for email addresses. Most jobs pay between 1 and 15 cents. “Turking makes us our rent money and helps pay off debt,” one turker told The Intercept. Another turker has called the work “voluntary slave labor.”

The task posted by “Global Science Research” appeared ordinary, at least on the surface. The company offered turkers $1 or $2 to complete an online survey. But there were a couple of additional requirements as well. First, Global Science Research was only interested in American turkers. Second, the turkers had to download a Facebook app before they could collect payment. Global Science Research said the app would “download some information about you and your network … basic demographics and likes of categories, places, famous people, etc. from you and your friends.”

“Our terms of service clearly prohibit misuse,” said a spokesperson for Amazon Web Services, by email. “When we learned of this activity back in 2015, we suspended the requester for violating our terms of service.”

Although Facebook’s early growth was driven by closed, exclusive networks at college and universities, it has gradually herded users to agree to increasingly permissive terms of service. By 2014, anything a user’s friends could see was also potentially visible to the developers of any app that they chose to download. Some of the turkers noticed that the Global Science Research app appeared to be taking advantage of Facebook’s porousness. “Someone can learn everything about you by looking at hundreds of pics, messages, friends, and likes,” warned one, writing on a message board. “More than you realize.” Others were more blasé. “I don’t put any info on FB,” one wrote. “Not even my real name … it’s backwards that people put sooo much info on Facebook, and then complain when their privacy is violated.”

In late 2015, the turkers began reporting that the Global Science Research survey had abruptly shut down. The Guardian had published a report that exposed exactly who the turkers were working for. Their data was being collected by Aleksandr Kogan, a young lecturer at Cambridge University. Kogan founded Global Science Research in 2014, after the university’s psychology department refused to allow him to use its own pool of data for commercial purposes. The data collection that Kogan undertook independent of the university was done on behalf of a military contractor called Strategic Communication Laboratories, or SCL. The company’s election division claims to use “data-driven messaging” as part of “delivering electoral success.”

SCL has a growing U.S. spin-off, called Cambridge Analytica, which was paid millions of dollars by Donald Trump’s campaign. Much of the money came from committees funded by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, who reportedly has a large stake in Cambridge Analytica. For a time, one of Cambridge Analytica’s officers was Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s senior adviser. Months after Bannon claimed to have severed ties with the company, checks from the Trump campaign for Cambridge Analytica’s services continued to show up at one of Bannon’s addresses in Los Angeles.

“You can say Mr. Mercer declined to comment,” said Jonathan Gasthalter, a spokesperson for Robert Mercer, by email.

Facebook Elections signs in the media area at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Aug. 6, 2015, before the first Republican presidential debate of the 2016 election.

Photo: John Minchillo/AP

The Intercept interviewed five individuals familiar with Kogan’s work for SCL. All declined to be identified, citing concerns about an ongoing inquiry at Cambridge and fears of possible litigation. Two sources familiar with the SCL project told The Intercept that Kogan had arranged for more than 100,000 people to complete the Facebook survey and download an app. A third source with direct knowledge of the project said that Global Science Research obtained data from 185,000 survey participants as well as their Facebook friends. The source said that this group of 185,000 was recruited through a data company, not Mechanical Turk, and that it yielded 30 million usable profiles. No one in this larger group of 30 million knew that “likes” and demographic data from their Facebook profiles were being harvested by political operatives hired to influence American voters.

Kogan declined to comment. In late 2014, he gave a talk in Singapore in which he claimed to have “a sample of 50+ million individuals about whom we have the capacity to predict virtually any trait.” Global Science Research’s public filings for 2015 show the company holding 145,111 British pounds in its bank account. Kogan has since changed his name to Spectre. Writing online, he has said that he changed his name to Spectre after getting married. “My wife and I are both scientists and quite religious, and light is a strong symbol of both,” he explained.

The purpose of Kogan’s work was to develop an algorithm for the “national profiling capacity of American citizens” as part of SCL’s work on U.S. elections, according to an internal document signed by an SCL employee describing the research.

“We do not do any work with Facebook likes,” wrote Lindsey Platts, a spokesperson for Cambridge Analytica, in an email. The company currently “has no relationship with GSR,” Platts said.

“Cambridge Analytica does not comment on specific clients or projects,” she added when asked whether the company was involved with Global Science Research’s work in 2014 and 2015.

The Guardian, which was was the first to report on Cambridge Analytica’s work on U.S. elections, in late 2015, noted that the company drew on research “spanning tens of millions of Facebook users, harvested largely without their permission.” Kogan disputed this at the time, telling The Guardian that his turker surveys had collected no more than “a couple of thousand responses” for any one client. While it is unclear how many responses Global Science Research obtained through Mechanical Turk and how many it recruited through a data company, all five of the sources interviewed by The Intercept confirmed that Kogan’s work on behalf of SCL involved collecting data from survey participants’ networks of Facebook friends, individuals who had not themselves consented to give their data to Global Science Research and were not aware that they were the objects of Kogan’s study. In September 2016, Alexander Nix, Cambridge Analytica’s CEO, said that the company built a model based on “hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Americans” filling out personality surveys, generating a “model to predict the personality of every single adult in the United States of America.”

Shortly after The Guardian published its 2015 article, Facebook contacted Global Science Research and requested that it delete the data it had taken from Facebook users. Facebook’s policies give Facebook the right to delete data gathered by any app deemed to be “negatively impacting the Platform.” The company believes that Kogan and SCL complied with the request, which was made during the Republican primary, before Cambridge Analytica switched over from Ted Cruz’s campaign to Donald Trump’s. It remains unclear what was ultimately done with the Facebook data, or whether any models or algorithms derived from it wound up being used by the Trump campaign.

In public, Facebook continues to maintain that whatever happened during the run-up to the election was business as usual. “Our investigation to date has not uncovered anything that suggests wrongdoing,” a Facebook spokesperson told The Intercept.

Facebook appears not to have considered Global Science Research’s data collection to have been a serious ethical lapse. Joseph Chancellor, Kogan’s main collaborator on the SCL project and a former co-owner of Global Science Research, is now employed by Facebook Research. “The work that he did previously has no bearing on the work that he does at Facebook,” a Facebook spokesperson told The Intercept.

Chancellor declined to comment.

Cambridge Analytica has marketed itself as classifying voters using five personality traits known as OCEAN — Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism — the same model used by University of Cambridge researchers for in-house, non-commercial research. The question of whether OCEAN made a difference in the presidential election remains unanswered. Some have argued that big data analytics is a magic bullet for drilling into the psychology of individual voters; others are more skeptical. The predictive power of Facebook likes is not in dispute. A 2013 study by three of Kogan’s former colleagues at the University of Cambridge showed that likes alone could predict race with 95 percent accuracy and political party with 85 percent accuracy. Less clear is their power as a tool for targeted persuasion; Cambridge Analytica has claimed that OCEAN scores can be used to drive voter and consumer behavior through “microtargeting,” meaning narrowly tailored messages. Nix has said that neurotic voters tend to be moved by “rational and fear-based” arguments, while introverted, agreeable voters are more susceptible to “tradition and habits and family and community.”

Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center at Arizona State University, said he was skeptical of the idea that the Trump campaign got a decisive edge from data analytics. But, he added, such techniques will likely become more effective in the future. “It’s reasonable to believe that sooner or later, we’re going to see widespread manipulation of people’s decision-making, including in elections, in ways that are more widespread and granular, but even less detectable than today,” he wrote in an email.

Donald Trump throws a hat to supporters during a campaign rally on Sept. 15, 2015, in Los Angeles.

Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Trump’s circle has been open about its use of Facebook to influence the vote. Joel Pollak, an editor at Breitbart, writes in his campaign memoir about Trump’s “armies of Facebook ‘friends,’ … bypassing the gatekeepers in the traditional media.” Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser, has written in his own campaign memoir about “geo-targeting” cities to deliver a debunked claim that Bill Clinton had fathered a child out of wedlock, and narrowing down the audience “based on preferences in music, age range, black culture, and other urban interests.”

Clinton, of course, had her own analytics effort, and digital market research is a normal part of any political campaign. But the quantity of data compiled on individuals during the run-up to the election is striking. Alexander Nix, head of Cambridge Analytica, has claimed to “have a massive database of 4-5,000 data points on every adult in America.” Immediately after the election, the company tried to take credit for the win, claiming that its data helped the Trump campaign set the candidate’s travel schedule and place online ads that were viewed 1.5 billion times. Since then, the company has been de-emphasizing its reliance on psychological profiling.

The Information Commissioner’s Office, an official privacy watchdog within the British government, is now looking into whether Cambridge Analytica and similar companies might pose a risk to voters’ rights. The British inquiry was triggered by reports in The Observer of ties between Robert Mercer, Cambridge Analytica, and the Leave.EU campaign, which worked to persuade British voters to leave the European Union. While Nix has previously talked about the firm’s work for Leave.EU, Cambridge Analytica now denies that it had any paid role in the campaign.

Leave.EU signage is displayed in London on March 5, 2016.

Photo: Rex Features/AP Images

In the U.S., where privacy laws are looser, there is no investigation. Cambridge Analytica is said to be pitching its products to several federal agencies, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff. SCL, its parent company, has new offices near the White House and has reportedly been advised by Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, on how to increase its federal business. (A spokesperson for Flynn denied that he had done any work for SCL.)

Years before the arrival of Kogan’s turkers, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg tried to address privacy concerns around the company’s controversial Beacon program, which quietly funneled data from outside websites into Facebook, often without Facebook users being aware of the process. Reflecting on Beacon, Zuckerberg attributed part of Facebook’s success to giving “people control over what and how they share information.” He said that he regretted making Beacon an “opt-out system instead of opt-in … if someone forgot to decline to share something, Beacon went ahead and still shared it with their friends.”

Seven years later, Facebook appears to have made the same mistake, but with far greater consequences. In mid-2014, however, Facebook announced a new review process, where the company would make sure that new apps asked only for data they would actually use. “People want more control,” the company said at that time. “It’s going to make a huge difference with building trust with your app’s audience.” Existing apps were given a full year to switch over to have Facebook review how they handled user data. By that time, Global Science Research already had what it needed.

Top photo: A collage of profile pictures makes up the Facebook logo on a wall at a Facebook Data Center in Forest City, N.C., in 2012.

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gotta love it one manipulative billionaire sucking another for another. I suggest that anyone with information on Bezos, zuckerburg, mercer or any other .01%er who is manipulating the publics’ “private information”start immediately posting same to the widest audience to which they have access. these scumbags obviously profit “bigly” (to borrow a term from one asshole) by taking advantage of an uninformed public.
none of this article is particularly surprising or shocking except for the fact that “our government” (translation of by and for the oligarchs) allows it to happen.
the result of this monumental failure is playing out in front of our eyes daily in the shit show in Washington dc. remember folks these scumbags (and others in the information age) are stealing and spending your money. this of course is the tip of the iceburg. I have named what 4 billionaires here whose combined wealth is probably equal to more than half the population of the usa.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Sunday that “alarm bells” should go off whenever President Trump calls something “fake,” adding the White House is trying to mislead the country into believing there is no connection between Russian officials and Trump campaign associates.

“I would tell people, whenever they see the president use the word ‘fake,’ it ought to set off alarm bells,” Schiff told host Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Anyone who thinks that Facebook doesn’t harvest and sell EVERYTHING you tell them needs to take their computers, unplug them from the wall, place them under the wheels of any handy vehicle and drive back and forth about 5 meters a good 20 or 30 times to make sure they can’t fix it.
They should not be on the internet, they are not mentally up to the access and all that it requires.

INTERCEPT!!!!!
FIX YOUR PROBLEM!!!!
WHY DO YOU REDIRECT AFTER MAKING A COMMENT, TO THE BEGINNING OF THE ARTICLE EACH TIME!
BEEN GOING ON THIS WAY ALWAYS.
DON NOT HAVE TECH STAFF TO FIX THIS?
ODD
OR R U NOT WANTING COMMENTS?

The amount of whatabouting and grim rationalizing in these comments are alarming and predictable. Propaganda used to be billboards and posters and bad documentaries, but never so personally tailored and targeted. Imagine millions of citizens being forced to arbitrarily Like Breitbart News or Gateway Pundit (or in Stone’s case, The National Enquirer: Hell Edition) and being fed a diet they had no witting choice in ordering. Clinton had her Shareblue and Correct The Record too, although these didn’t traffic in actual Fake News. I don’t care which party does it, nobody signed up for this shit. And to celebrate such dystopian schemes as “freedom” and “effective advertising” have me convinced that many people enjoyed Mad Men in all the wrong ways.

Louise Mensch (who is mostly breathlessly insane) thinks SCL/CA is a defacto GRU intelligence operation, and if you listen to some of the claims from the first senate hearing (the idea that specific swing states were micro-targeted), she may not be alone in this theory. Could be nonsense, but alas. More to come.

Hmmm. The left has been talking about how successful they are in “nudging” citizens – i.e. subliminal manipulation of their opinions. They achieve it in ways similar to that described in the article, yet the mainstream media has shown no interest in exposing it.

How many Americans are aware that the Chairman of Google (now Alphabet) created a new company run and owned by him prior to the 2008 election to do data mining on behalf of the Obama campaign? The mission of the company was stated to be providing intelligence exclusively to progressive politicians. How were citizens’ activities using Google and its various applications used for political purpose by the left?

Academic studies have shown that search results from Google about politicians, campaigns, etc. show an uncanny bias in favor of progressive politicians and causes. Furthermore, queries about negative aspects of progressive politicians are pushed far down the ordered list of responses or in some cases censored completely out of existence. (Try using Google, Dogpile and DuckDuckGo to test sample queries and compare the results.)

Facebook itself was exposed last year for the political bias favoring progressive politicians and articles in suggested posts, with conservative flavored posts or articles appearing less often. I saw many cases where a negative post about Hillary was matched with glowing posts or articles about Hillary as suggested reading. The same never occurred with negative posts about Trump.

The left was quite smug about how it “outsmarted” the right in the 2008 and 2012 elections through the use of data mining, modeling, etc. The finishing touch of course has been the willingness of the media to publish the resulting stories to “nudge” voters in the “approved” progressive direction.

I am anxiously awaiting The Intercept’s deep dive into that sordid world on the left.

You mean the Right.
There is no left in the US, the Democratic Party has moved into the territory once occupied by Ronald Reagan and the Republicans have gone so far to the right that in most industrialized countries on the planet they’d be outlawed as a party.
You really need to understand how your political spectrum narrowed an moved to the right over the last 35 years.
Again, take this to heart because it is fact: in the US there is NO left movement.
The right were successful in killing it in the 80’s.
Now you are just arguing over who’s team is better, yours or theirs, when in fact in all the policies that aren’t political wedge issues used to drive you at each others throats they are quite in agreement with each other.
In other words wake up already.

Well folks, we seem to have forgotten that it took 80,000 votes to put Trump into the White House. The manipulation, err, persuasion of 80,000 or more people in selected geographies is just what is discussed here. This, combined with some very nice work by a well oiled troll network just may have tipped the balance in the 2016 elections.
Out with the old, in with the new and propaganda puts on out a new face and is takes a new name.

The next young billionaire: someone who writes an operating system/browser/social messaging package that is completely secure and has zero advertising. Sell it for a few hundred dollars, like Microsoft Office. Politicians and IT professionals would be the first ones to buy it.

This article is pure propaganda. I don’t understand the logic of a campaign paying a company and then suddenly that company becomes an affiliate:

“SCL has a growing U.S. spin-off, called Cambridge Analytica, which was paid millions of dollars by Donald Trump’s campaign”

Is every company that Hillary paid an ‘affiliate’ — this is ridiculous and totally incorrect use of English, law, and economic terms … all for the tantrum trashing needed after a racketeering war-criminal lost to a reality TV star.

This article is like the last season of House of Cards. As someone outside the US, i found the issues of how to use big data in an election absolutely fascinating. Still surreal that it is actually happening, and it makes even more interesting how confirmation biases can be manipulated and exploited.

President Trumps’s conceptual slogans during his election campaign, which would have the effect that America would be less interfering in the affairs of other states and to take more care of itself, sent a very serious signal to the globalists. Once again, the US has been a symbol of globalism and the expansion of the power of transnational corporations. Those who represent their interests are a huge community that takes up arms against Trump and his government and is generally against anything he does. They are trying in every way to spread sand into the gear. Some similar things happen in France, where mountains have been excavated from compromising material from ten to fifteen years ago, and are presented without exception by an “anti-Russia prism.” It was a long time since I last saw such a dirty campaign when it came to the concepts and ideas, how to develop a state and a country, and these dirty campaigns are led, we also had that not so long ago and I see nothing good in it at all!

This is actually a nonstory, because people voluntarily put all their information on facebook. If someone writes a script to scrape, or creates a poll for users to use, or even if the users are SO unscrupulous as to join Lex Bezos @ the dark side by signing up to be a sock muppet via mechanical turks, then the person harvesting their data has every right to do so. Alls fair in love and data, and if you publish stuff about yourself then it can be used against you and you can’t complain. I’ve known about the dangers of facebook and I’ve valued my privacy for > 10 yrs now, and I’m just some random programmer with the very SAME access to the INternet as these other jokers. So why is it now, 2017, they are worried about their data? It’s too late. They’ve got it all now thanks to the NSA, NGA, CIA, FBI and other vast shared datastores so it’s really a moot point.

Zuckerburg like the rest of the RICH 1% Corporations and Individuals (The TRUE Gods of the Evangelical Republican Party) is only like the rest of them about getting his share of the WEALTH! I’m sure one of the ANTI-American Computer Companies that pushed Marsha Blackburn to get the Privacy eliminated from the Internet for her $600,000+ campaign funds. This woman has her district so gerrymandered Jesus Christ couldn’t win an election.

privacy.
logging all your internet requests by your isp for the purpose of advertising does give people an identifier, not necessarily a name but certainly an account, a profile, then you get the ads.
BUT
logging every by the subcontractors of agencies gives politicians and wallstreet power over you in such manners as to rob your business, hijack customers and contacts, and more.

I believe it is rather ironic that this media source is playing up to political power mongers by downplaying the criminality of the GOP affiliated organizations actions and instead are providing them a cover story that points a finger at the company that was actually assaulted and victimized by the crime and now a second assault for not doing enough to prevent the crime! This train of thought behind this article would make virtually every victim responsible for the crimes perpetrated upon them! Yes, it’s your fault you got robbed or raped, not the offender!!!!!!

I don’t think there is any privacy problem associated with people who want to share their private lives with others. Most of us who love our country and want to make it great again feel it quite important to share some of our private stuff. I know many people don’t and they should simply stop using smartphones and switch back to dumbphones. But after knowingly using smartphones that are designed to be invasive they should not complain. And remember, dumbphones are just as bad. Any communication that you make with others goes through public space where anybody with sufficient amount of gadgets and sophistry can intercept it.

That said, anybody with a Facebook account is very stupid and deserves to be stripped of his privates.

At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

After 30 Plus years of the Hemisphere Database feeding whats become the Project Dragnet Hammer Database, 2013 and Edward Snowden, Sixteen years now of Bush an Obamas secret assault on our Constitutional rights and the Wikileaks Vault 7 releases you (as an investigative journalists) take UMBRAGE at what Obama was doing to whip Romney even while Facebook and Google currently engaging in real time censorship of fact based news as I write this because TRUMP.

The DNC is Lying. Podesta and the Clintons make the case for Ron Wydens suggestion the SSIC focus on the financial ties of US Administration officials with Russian Oligarchs. Go Ron.

In addition to Facebook – in that name – contributing $120,000 to CPAC, this is the other reason why I closed my FB account. Too cozy with trump and use of personal info for marketing and possibly nefarious purposes.

Key is the development of a single record for a voter that aggregates all that is known about them.

[…]

For each voter, a score is computed ranking probability of the right vote. Analytics can model demographics, social factors and many other attributes of the needed voters. Modeling will tell us what who we need to turn out and why, and studies of effectiveness will let us know what approaches work well. Machine intelligence across the data should identify the most important factors for turnout, and preference.

It should be possible to link the voter records in Van with upcoming databases from companies like Comcast and others for media measurement purposes.

The analytics tools can be built in house or partnered with a set of vendors.

Because FB is not a social network, they don’t give a shit about “connecting the world, etc”, they are a data mining/advertising company and this is where the money is. If someone wants free chats, they can go back to ircs I suppose.

This article is a nice companion to the piece Jane Meyer just wrote for The New Yorker. Both articles lead me to the conclusion that Facebook is a useful tool for business advertising and nothing else..

I can see that it’s appealing to blame Trump’s victory on an evil company using big data, but the truth is Trump was elected because tens of millions of US citizens voted for him. Maybe you should think about the reasons why they did (feelings of being left behind by globalism, hatred for conventional politicians, etc) rather than scraping around for a convenient explanation

FB will keep running the shell game and gathering more data; modifying the TOS, interface, and making tradeoffs where a click for a benefit automatically unchecks privileges. Companies now substitute the fine print with links to links.

These type of tricks can be reined in with a law like truth-in-lending.

Republicans (and the Corporate Party) would not allow a “truth-in-lending” privacy bill to come to the floor – one is for the Telecom’s; the other for the Silicons.

I didn’t think the link would really help anybody here, but one cannot live in his/her own bubble.

After reading Jane Mayer’s NY piece on Robert Mercer, I commented about not taking those adorable little personality tests, etc. I would make it a more forceful statement if I could substantiate what is being collected. Anybody?

First off flooding the ISP with data is called DDOS and it is a supremely misguided and stupid thing to do. They didn’t sell your data, Facebook did.

Next, who are you going to hold accountable? Yourself? If you are a Facebook user then you posted the data on a public forum, you gave the website your personal info and you then proceeded to spill your guts and your life, food and sex preferences, jobs, musical tastes, favourite pets, etc to the world all out in the open.
You want to go after someone start by throwing yourself against the wall.

You should be pissed off, you didn’t understand what you were doing and you did it anyway.

i did not miss the point of the article.
My analysis is based on the evidence that people who put anything at all on that site are doing so IN SPITE OF their willing ignorance that they might be misled or confused. Common knowledge. No excuse. The relationship between the residents of fb cannot be that much different between Winklevoss and zuckerberg.

No it wasn’t, it was publicly available info that ANYONE can mine from Facebook.
There was nothing nefarious here other than most of the Facebook communities apparent lack of understanding about what it means to put ANYTHING out on the internet.

I’ve been working on IT systems, most all of the directly connected to the internet, for 25 years now and for ALL of those 25 years we keep telling all of you every time we can get you to actually listen the when you post ANYTHING out into the network it is EXACTLY the same as taking that information, going to Times Square and with a giant PA system and a big display unit shouting your post to everyone within earshot.
If you didn’t get that then you probably shouldn’t be on the network.

Interestingly enough, not a single tactic/strategy they described requires the gray hat tactic of scraping facebook. All of it (and MUCH more) can be done through Facebook’s ads manager product. Highly skeptical this list drove any meaningful results.